To be honest, folks, I’d rather be writing about another topic, but Drew Nelles on Maisonneuve has a thoughtful piece on the student strikes that’s worth reading.

Students demonstrated again Saturday night. I was out and saw more police than students: a “special” bus filled with extra cops on Sherbrooke near the Main, every metro train with a detachment of police in green visibility vests.

Yes, I’ll be honest, I have some theoretical ideas about what education is for and universities are for, but Antonio, I’m not too interested in having a full-blown debate about that on this blog. It’s not a Montreal issue, or even a Quebec issue, particularly.

You could say its a local issue. We have many of the same programs as every other university on the planet, though it could be argued some of those programs are training people for careers that dont exist *here*.

Once again, two posters have reduced university to a Trade School, and have quoted a mediocre New York Times article, rather than looking at the bigger picture of civilization. Lots of well-trained engineers are currently destroying the planet for Monsanto and Exxon. That’s now what university is for. And you can criticize Philosophy and Sociology all you want… Once the engineers and MBAs have destroyed your planet, you’ll be needing lots of priests and social workers.

You got it right Kate. I can confirm the medias didn’t understand what was happening with the spokespeople at the CLASSE. Someone presented its candidature to be the third spokesperson; after debates that person’s candidature was rejected mainly over fears of losing the woman-man parity (Jeanne Reynolds and Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois) that is in place right now.

@mdblog: GND and JR do have mandates to negociate, but not over tuition fees.

I think all public property dammage should be tacked on to the tuition increase. Thatll teach them not to damage public property while they’re still not contributing for it’s upkeep. We all pay for that.

Most of the people are being arrested for not dispersing/attending an illegal march, not for criminal activity & vandalism. Lets not get get washed up by the PR campaign against the students and the quota of arrests the SPVM is making. It’s like the photos in Le Journal that show bandana covered faces in a cloud of billowing smoke; that smoke is not burning vandalism but tear gas, the bandanas are not to hide their identity but to help you breath in that tear gas.
What’s the point of a protest march if your opponents simply have to decry it ‘illegal’ and everyone packs up and goes home? Pilots go on strike – illegal. Canada Post employees go on strike – illegal. Nurses go on strike – illegal. Even Montreal cops have gone on illegal strikes.

— n
1. the exercise or an instance of physical force, usually effecting or intended to effect injuries, destruction, etc
2. powerful, untamed, or devastating force: the violence of the sea
3. great strength of feeling, as in language, etc; fervour
4. an unjust, unwarranted, or unlawful display of force, esp such as tends to overawe or intimidate
5. do violence to
a. to inflict harm upon; damage or violate: they did violence to the prisoners
b. to distort or twist the sense or intention of: the reporters did violence to my speech

[C13: via Old French from Latin violentia impetuosity, from violentus violent ]

No , it’s not binary, it’s making the point that there are a lot of very sick or very confused people who seem to have no problem with students and supporters being physically injured in the midst of legitimate protest, but can’t resist shouting if a bank’s [insured] windows get broken or the Apple store has paint thrown on it .

@ Raoul “I think all public property dammage should be tacked on to the tuition increase.”
If environmental damage is tacked onto the price of gasoline and cars, they will practically disappear from our roads. Until this happens, talking about “making vandals pay” is just empty polemic.

@qatzelok What the fuck are you on about? Are the demonstrations about tuition increases or are they about every last god damn thing that is wrong with the world? Yes, environmental destruction is bad. Yes, capitalism is a far from a perfectly fair system. Yes, in a perfect world we could all get top-notch educations for free.

How about the students put their energies toward constructively solving some of these problems instead of marching in the street whining about how unfair life is?

@mdblog
What the fuck are you talking about?
qatzelok (in his/her spirited words) was merely saying that asking students as a whole pay for the damage caused by some protestors is unreasonable, invoking a comparison that attempting to show that all sorts of public costs are not internalized to the groups that cause them. How do you go from that to claiming that the students protest against environmental damage?!

Though I don’t agree with qatzelok’s analogy, I think he’s right that society subsidizes the automobile way too much, and the subsidy includes but isn’t limited to all the environmental damage caused by cars, which we don’t factor into the cost though we should. We need to wean people off of cars and into public transit.

Well, here’s an (admittedly imperfect) analogy…we’ve got too many BA’s and not enough skilled workers making decent money to keep funding our social programs with their taxes; let’s stop subsidizing an arts degree for every Jane, Jill, and Barbara, and selectively subsidize courses of study whose graduates the economy actually needs and will pay for. This way, fewer cars on the road and fewer self-righteous arts grads with no marketable skills and poor job prospects. Better environment and economy and less pollution all around.

Im with antonio on his last comments. Not only that, youll get better service at your local coffeehouse/gasstation/restaurant. I stopped counting the number of retarded managers i had to put with that had no business skill except, you guessed it, an arts degree. (not that i mind the EI, but still…)

@qatzelok I missed your point entirely. Just frustrated that these students are wasting their collective energy asking for a handout. If only they would protest FOR solutions instead of empty whining about problems. My sincere apologies.

Oh for crying out loud, Raoul. I’ve butt heads with Kate a bunch of times, but it *is* her blog and she’s clearly welcome to set the rules she likes. It’s not thought police for someone to dictate the terms of use for their own blog.

If you don’t like it, no one’s stopping you from making your own blog.

I think this has an enormous potential. Collective Transport, on demand. Would this work also with mini-buses? They could be pretty well filled, instead of waiting for regular (or even not so regular) half-empty/overfull buses.
Note that in ‘developing’ countries such shared transport works already pretty well, and without any electronic devices …
Access also does not have to be only via smartphone, but could be by telephone, internet, or sign on for a regular work-week. Sharing the vehicle should make it much cheaper than a regular taxi fare, and also cheaper than owning a car, e.g. to drive alone in a car in from the suburbs to downtown.

Similar to a developing country, I was in Kiev in a few years ago and there were a number of private mini buses in operation. Presumably because the gov’t provided transport was not sufficient. The buses I used would wait outside a metro station until enough people had boarded, then go do its route. I think you had to tell the driver when it was your stop, but I’m sure they would remember regulars. Worked ok and was surprisingly cheap but then it was Kiev not Montreal.

Josh Freed has his say during Quel Avenir’s week on anglo/franco issues, basically “Why can’t we all just get along?”

Thursday’s commenter was Simon Brault, president of Culture Montreal. He makes an interesting point that the English language seeping into Montreal and poisoning its cultural life is not the fault of the resident anglophone population, but the triumph of globalized culture.

It’s more that I wonder what the RCMP has to hide in this case. They should be gung-ho for helping clean up corruption, instead of which they tried to block access to a whole pile of information. Sure, it might just be a pissy little jurisdictional fight, but there could be more to it than that.

The tuition has been increasing since 2007, above the rate of inflation.
Between 1994 and 2007, the tuition was frozen, but at the beginning of the freeze there was a hike of 30%. According to the bank of canada inflation calculator, the inflation between 1994 and 2007 was 30.09%. So effectively since 1994, the tuition has actually been going up compared to inflation.

This of course ignores the hidden increases that come via administrative fees. I remember a long time ago, during tuition freeze there was an article talking about how Universities used fees as a way to get more money from students. They are now a significant portion of the fees that students pay. For example, in 2005/2006, while the tuition was still frozen for Quebec students, I paid 1200$ for fees at McGill (i.e. excluding tuition, and medical care).

This also ignores the costs for books which seem to have gotten quite out of hand as well.

There is very little control that the universities have over the cost of books, to be fair; most professors are conscious of these costs and try to keep them down. The fees are a problem, but the reality is that the schools need more money, and the government refuses to give it to them. (I don’t support the increased fees or the planned increase in tuition.)

I visited the UK this past spring with the intent on moving there but I realised, more than ever, that I am a Quebecois who belongs in Quebec. Vive la Québec, vive la langue française, vive la justice sociale.

@Kevin, jeather
Fair enough. But the point is that the costs of education as whole for students are going up, even when the media portrays it otherwise.
The freeze has been over for many years, and even then costs went up on average.

@ant6n: If the students are under the impression that their expenses (for anything – food, shelter, electricity, education) are generally going to stay static from year to year, then I think that’s their issue.

As I wrote, the tuition was frozen between 1994 and 2007. However, at the beginning of the freeze, the tuition was increased by 30%, which roughly corresponds to the cumulative inflation between 1994 and 2007.

Uh about that ‘sober’ CBC article, they missed the whole point about how Quebec’s public and corporate worlds are wholly corrupt, have been bleeding billions of dollars from already stressed taxpayers, and how it is *immoral* (yes morality falls into this issue) to ask one of the poorest slices of our population to cough up 75% more (plus interest) for one of the only pathways to class mobility left to the average Quebecer.

“one of the only pathways to class mobility left to the average Quebecer.”

Not only class mobility, but just as importantly, social awareness. Social awareness (understanding the power abuses inherent in a class-based system) is what is most needed from our universities. Everyone who attends walks away with a bit more of this than they had before they went.

Is it not conceivable that holding back class mobility and reducing social awareness wouldn’t displease politicians one tiny bit?

Quebec is such an interesting case. Until the 1960s the Catholic Church kept a lid on the place, then linguistic nationalism took over some of people’s willingness to hold back their personal ambitions and reduce their involvement in the wider world on the promise of a better life (once it was after death, then it was in an independent Quebec). Now we’re all on the internet and while nationalism is still alive its flame is not the big passionate bonfire it once was. How are you going to hold them down now?

Tax them hard, beat them with sticks, make it more difficult to cast off the “brand on the tongue” of growing up speaking bad joual, cut back on Radio-Canada so there’s less motivation to listen to people speaking standard French, push them back into the woods and the wilderness and make them hew wood, draw water and dig in the ground for your corporate masters. What do you think?

Kate, fantastic point. I have similar suspicions but you’ve expressed them much more clearly than I ever could.

For my part, what would be nice is if the students would articulate “why” they need tuitions kept down. If there is a reasonable argument to be made for this, I think that the public (who is being asked to pay for this) should be made aware of it.

If all the students are saying is “we can’t afford the increase” then it opens to door to taxpayers/voters making the same argument (i.e. we can’t afford NOT to raise tuitions), doesn’t it?

And I was having such a nice Friday too… the idea that politicians would purposely raise the bar on access to education… it boggles the mind. How about… we accept the tuition hike but require that all course materials created thereafter be published freely online so that people can study-along-at-home at no cost to them, followed by taking an exam to earn their diplomas..? It cuts costs and opens up higher education to more people…

Ok, I’ll bite… *puts on Concordia student hat*
First, I’d like to say that I am kind of in a hurry here but my argument might not be as thought through as I’d like.
Second, “The Students” is something that does not exist. We are not a monolithic group and some of us are busy with classes and exams to make our voices really heard.
Third, It is not because I am not on strike and have decided not to take part in the protests that I am in, any shape or form, for the hikes. There has been in the media an automatic association that protestors are against the hikes and those that staid in classe are for them. Makes me want to yell at someone when I hear that.
Now, why am I against the hikes? I can only speak for myself so here it goes: Stop wasting my money! Personally, I could afford the hike. I know that not everybody could, but, selfishly, I can. Does not mean I want *them* to keep wasting my money. I don’t want them to have three quarters of a million dollars in a golden parachute, I don’t want them to drop hundreds on millions of dollars downt he drain that is Îlot Voyageur, I don’t want the Dean of McGill to spend nearly 10K in a first class ticket to Brasil ( really? Business was no enough? You needed first? WHy not pay the different from your own pocket! ). I don’t want the UQAM/TR/S to spend 200 million dollars per year in publicity and them have all of them tell ME that there is not enough money to teach. Put your house in order, stop wasting money left and right and paying people more than they are worth (I am talking administrators here, I don’t think teachers are overpaid), stop WASTING. If the education system was in order and there wasn’t millions of dollars going down the drain every year, I would gladly pay my share of the tuition hikes. Even pay more than my share. Pay whatever I can afford to get an education if it meant people who could afford less could also get their education. But as it is? No way! These hikes just mean that there will be more wasted money, more people getting nice financial cushions, more stupid projects that aren’t properly studied nor executed. There will be ZERO increase in the quality of the education I will be getting because this hike is not to benefit me, it is to benefit the corrupted administrations that are endemic at every level in the Education department.
So there, this is my selfish opinion. Then you can add that it is not fair and that the poorest students won’t be able to afford it and that it will prevent social mobility, etc, etc. These arguments are not wrong, per se, but they are not my main argument. That is why the whole “They can afford it, they just need not to buy the latest iPad or buy 6$ coffees” argument makes me want to smack people… it is not because I can afford it that I want to waste my money. I could probably afford to cut a 20$ in pieces every week and wash it down the drain. Does not mean I want to!
I hope I did not come across as too belligerent, I try to be respectful of other people’s opinions and if you felt I was yelling at any of you, my mistake, it was not the case.
And now… to prepare for my summer semester that starts Monday…
*gets off the soap box*

What numbers. He says only 35% of the students are on strike, and then says that only 20% of students actually support the strikes as a whole – basically assuming that all faculties that are not on strike unanimously voted against them, but all faculties that are on strike only got barely more than half support for them.

Then he makes big words about economics and debt and whatnot, ignoring that the tuition hikes are nearly negligible from a budget point of view; conveniently he has no numbers. One number – reducing hike down to weekly numbers: great! Did you know that if you make a million a year, you make less than 2$ per Minute. That’s only like an expensive phone call!

The rest is just the typical anti arts rants that’s basically unrelated to the tuition issue itself. Ending with cheers for the government.

Man, you sould get an arts degree, maybe then you’ll be able to analyze this rant a bit more critically. Or you should get a real degree, like a math degree, which would give you the ability to analyze the lacking numbers a bit better.

@ant6n
I’ve argued part of that before: the goal isn’t to bankrupt (would be) students; it’s to get students who are going to be earning a hell of a lot more money after graduation to pay a more equitable share of the costs upfront, and to divert more people into higher paying fields.

If society is picking up 80-90% of the tab, why shouldn’t it have a say in what people study?

@ant6n: I have an arts degree, and two others. I see your arts degree, if you have one, hasn’t allowed you to move beyond the sexist presumption that an author is male when she is actually female. You only needed to look at the author’s name, but your arts degree hasn’t taught you to look that closely. Speaks volumes about the rigour with which you approach things in general. I’d say none. Pseudo-leftist platitudes and truisms do not equal intellectual rigour, hate to break it to you. I wish you had more to show for your degree, assuming you have one, because I did help pay for it to the tune of 89% or so.

Well, Sandy is a girl’s or a boy’s name; and by reading the text and not the name of the author I’m naturally sexist; which naturally means that my analysis of the article is completely invalid. Talk about strawman argument.

Please point out the “Pseudo-leftist platitudes” and “truisms” in my writing. I try to argue in numbers, and dislike irrelevant arguments; you just elevate any rant against students to “reason” and in this case pretend they have the numbers to show for it, when they actually don’t.

@Kevin
Paying tuition via taxation is the most progressive way to finance education. It exactly does what you say – have people who earn a hell of a lot more money pay a much larger contribution of their education through taxes. As opposed to user fees for everyone, which are largely regressive.

@ant6n: I don’t actually think you’re sexist; I do think you lack rigour. That was my point. Feigning indignation at your “sexism” was rhetorical flourish to demonstrate that you didn’t even bother to closely read and address the item in question and that your “dismissal” of it is a joke.

@ant6n: no, sir, I was simply calling you on the straw man because it was by way of the straw man fallacy that you “refuted” Sandy’s commentary without ever actually addressing it. Making reference to the “sexist presumption” that the author is male is not straw man. It’s an ad hominem, perhaps (which isn’t always a fallacy), but not a straw man.

A woman who works at UdeM wrote a letter to the Gazette about her outrage about the criminalization of the right to protest. Another woman, who writes for Voir, echoes something I’ve heard all day off Twitter and elsewhere: the demo was peaceful until police charged and attacked.

Who’s paying for the broken windows at HSBC, Chapters, TD, Scotia? The damage to cars? Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois is being turned into the villain because he’s acting like a juvenile and not taking responsibility for the actions and consequences. Take control of your website. Take control of your members. Take pictures of those that are resorting to violence. Help the police ensure that the protests are 100% peaceful. And if you can’t ensure that they will be, move the protests to where damage to personal property is at a minimum.

Lost in all this – the province’s offer during the short-circuited negotiations, as leaked to La Presse: an expansion of grants (not loans) to more middle-class students, at a cost of $30-40 million. This is a substantial offer and would just about cover any small accessibility issues caused by the tuition hikes not already covered by the expansion of the bursary program already announced. The province would pay for this by reducing the ineffective and inefficient tuition tax credits.

As a student of student aid and issues of access for most of the last decade, I’m pleased to see the province continue to move in this direction. It seems like a decent and fair policy choice, and enough of a compromise to the alleged concerns of the more moderate student groups (the FEUQ and the FECQ). Sadly, nobody’s talking about it. Not even this blog, which has had some interesting policy discussions on the subject (though not recently, for obvious reasons).

I don’t understand people who think that a loose movement of students should control itself better than the strict hierarchy of government and police – and even more so, that the giant number of students should control itself despite the violence and intimidation coming from police.

@Joey
Great, they’ll take the tuition credits. I paid 60K in tuition for my education (as an international student), I’d really like to get some back via tax credits to help pay off the debts.

In what is a refreshingly different perspective from the items posted by Kate, Henry Aubin admonishes the PQ hacks at CSDM for irresponsibly encouraging high school children to boycott classes for three days.

I’m really troubled by the government’s infantilizing rhetoric. The request that student leaders ‘control their group’ has strong echoes of ‘first, clean up your room…’. The whole tone strikes me as disrespectful and dismissive. Can one imagine using this style of communication toward women protesting or doctors on strike? Suggestions that students are irresponsible, irrational or that neoliberal economics is as uncontestable as the law of gravity remind me just how hegemonic that discourse has become over the past 30 years – even more remarkable given its recent stunning failures. It’s as if a whole segment of society has become so afraid to imagine other ways that they are on some kind of patrol against dissenters. Hats off to the students for holding on to their protests; they are wiser than they know.

Ironic (and sad) that the young are addressing long-term goals while the old fight for short-term consumption. But I guess it makes sense since they’ll be dead when it comes time to pay the piper for their greed and corruption.

CTV just shared a stat that from last nights (wednesday 25th) protest > “last night 85 people arrested, but only 15 for criminal activities, now of those 15 only about five or six of them were actually students”

The problem with CLASSE is that it doesn’t have a leader. I’ve had to correct a few of my colleagues who say that Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois is the organization’s president – he’s not. He’s a spokesman, a figurehead.

And that’s the problem. How is the government (or anyone, really) supposed to negotiate with a ‘group’ of 170,000 people that want to operate strictly in terms of direct democracy?

That works fine for a family, but anything larger that operates that way is a mob*.

@Kevin anarchy is hardly a new concept. its entirely based on decentralized decision-making. (ie let the locals decide what happens in their own locale).

As much as i disagree with the students, its become eminently clear the gov’t is intentionally putting oil on the fire so they can call an election on this issue, and on the backs of students. It does create an interesting question though, if the libs go to election on the tuition increase issue, who will the anglos vote for?

A student group like CLASSE is never going to have the cohesiveness of a government. Nadeau-Dubois is nobody’s poor little boy but it’s totally a sideshow for the Charest government to treat CLASSE like another government, or like a fully accredited union. It’s more chaotic than that – anyone with any sense would see that it has to be.

Anyway, as noted above, a lot of the casseurs are not students. Please ponder this: students are specifically people who do have an investment in the future – yes, they’re angry, but they’re adults who have shown themselves willing to devote years of their lives to conforming to university rules and professors’ instructions, they’re mostly not sociopaths. And now they’re willing to delay graduation to make a point, which is that our society has to be about more than bleeding its members dry for the banks.

I think you’re missing my point. I just couldn’t believe that you were invoking this guy’s age, as if it were relevant in any way. You seem to be implying that we need to lay off him because he’s just a kid. Well, if he’s just a kid then why should anyone take him seriously in any capacity?

From what I can gather, there is no single issue that the protesters are protesting about. Some want to avoid tuition hikes; some want their money better managed by higher education institutions and the government; some are railing against the capitalist system in general. I could probably go on.

It seems that the only common theme is “For whatever our grievance may be, do what we say or we will do what we can to wreck the common bonds between us, otherwise known as society”.

@Kate If CLASSE is not cohesive enough to delegate someone with full negotiation powers, they don’t deserve to be at the table. Franchement!

@Raoul.
The way Charest is talking he’s not about to call an election.
If he does, Anglos will likely vote en masse for the Liberals*. After all, anglos in Quebec value education quite a bit, and understand the individual financial payoff. There’s a reason Concordia, McGill, and Bishop’s get more, much more funding from alumni than every French university in the province put together.

*There are still too many ex-separatists/French language ‘defenders’ in the CAQ for most anglos to be completely comfortable, even if most like 8 out of 10 of his ideas.

@Kevin
do you really think charest wants to go to election based on his record to date? he’d love to make this the election issue (forget corruption). Say it does happen, would it be duplicitous for the anglos that support the students to vote against them by supporting the libs?

A good point. But a better point is: who is paying for all the damage caused by cars and by international banking tyranny? The answer: the students, their non-marching peers, and all the future generations. This generation gap has no easy band-aid, and it’s obviously the status quo that needs to CHANGE.